Hi, hon! As part of my dA Roadtrip, I will be critiquing this (and two other) pieces from your gallery. Please keep in mind that these are just my opinions; any changes you make to the pieces should be what YOU, as the artist, want to do. It is, after all, YOUR work--feel free to take or leave my suggestions as you see fit!

I knew, before I asked you to be my next stop, that I really wanted to comment on this piece especially. It's the first piece I read by you, and is the reason I added you to my watch list. I am in love with your word choice here--you pair powerful, vibrant imagery with harsh, strong words, and the effect is LOVELY. This piece is absolutely breath-taking, so good work!

There's only one thing I'd like to talk about--while I think your word choice is great, I think the word placement could be worked on a little bit. I'd like to take you through each stanza and give you my thoughts on where lines should end/begin and so on--again, you don't have to change it unless you want to. These are just my thoughts on how to make this read more smoothly/naturally.

So, stanza one:

I'd suggest something along the lines of this:

the first words

were not sun and moon and stars,

but oh god

I will wear this power

like a bearskin--

like a drum machine

in a chicken-bone key.

carnivorous

Stanza two:

I'd suggest just a small change here:

instinct is the sum

of all the parts we're too afraid to eat:

black wires, white bulbs,

wicks from tallow candles.

if they

Stanza three:

would let us,

we could make wax breathe:

Stanza four:

we could hunt the essence

of smoking fluorescent galaxies,

all our strange living lives

and neon paradises,

all our blue planets

and disemboweled sacrifices,

if only we could

Stanza five:

breathe

while below us the round sky winds down

and holds bone to our throats,

so we are spilled,

forced up and wondering:

Stanza six:

if sugar

were sweet,

then could

thisbe?

Again, I want to stress that you really don't HAVE to make any changes to this piece--it's beautiful, and you might have reasons for formatting it the way you did that I, as an outsider looking in, don't know or understand. Beautiful job, over all!

yeah, I see it. actually, it works pretty well, until the last stanza.

that was a pretty good movie (well, most of it), but I don't know how the tree/love/warrior/rebirth metaphor has anything to do with the actual state of the universe. I think it's just projecting human symbolism onto something that we're the result of, not the core of.

...which is something I was thinking about while writing this coincidenceithinknot